Editing Beatrice Webb (section)

==Death and legacy==
When Beatrice Webb died in 1943, she was cremated at [[Woking Crematorium]]. The casket containing her ashes was buried in the garden of their house in Passfield Corner, as she had requested. Lord Passfield's ashes were also buried there when he died four years later.
[[File:Beatrice Webb, 1943.jpg|thumb|Beatrice Webb, 1943]]
Shortly afterward, the nonagenarian [[George Bernard Shaw]] launched an ultimately successful [[petition]] to have the remains of both moved to [[Westminster Abbey]]. They now lie buried in the [[nave]] of the Abbey, close to the ashes of their Labour Party colleagues [[Clement Attlee]] and [[Ernest Bevin]].

Beatrice did not live to see the [[welfare state]] set up by the [[Attlee ministry|post-war Labour government]]. It was an enduring monument to her research and campaigning, before and after she married Sidney Webb. First outlined in the [[Minority report (Poor Law)]] of 1909, it would remain substantially intact until the 1980s. It is not certain that Beatrice Webb would have approved of the manner of its implementation and future management. As her niece Kitty commented:<ref>Kitty Muggeridge & Ruth Adams, ''Beatrice Webb: A life, 1858–1943'', London: Secker & Warburg, 1967, p. 177.</ref>

<blockquote>... although it was Beatrice herself who put the 20th-century ''zeitgeist'' into its most concrete form, in the Welfare State, something in her remained sturdily Victorian to the very end. "What has to be aimed at is not this or that improvement in material circumstances or physical comfort but an improvement in personal character," she wrote. She believed that citizens who were given benefits by the community ought to make an effort to improve themselves, or at least submit themselves to those who would improve them.</blockquote>